These stories drop like bombs on the world of childcare, and even if you're well out of the phase, and did it all "right" anyway, they have a great emotional pull. There can't be much that's worse than consigning your child to an adulthood of obesity, ill-health and stigma, and all because you were too flaky to breastfeed.

Nevertheless, like almost everything pertaining to formula feeding versus breastfeeding, there are elements to this study that should make us sceptical. First, it is being treated as a new discovery, when it was already well known that fat cells are created in childhood – indeed, the formative time for their creation is nought to three.

Second, it was also well-known that it's very hard to overfeed a breastfeeding baby. Many babies suckle for comfort when they're not necessarily hungry, but human breasts seem to have some inbuilt sonar for that, which a person holding a bottle doesn't. Breastfeeding is also quite hard work for the baby, so there's a food/calorie pay-off. It's not a radical new connection, in other words. Here though it is presented in a fatalistic, binary way: 20% of adult obesity is caused by infant nutrition – ergo, all mothers should be encouraged to breastfeed, and all mothers who don't have set off an obesity timebomb.

A more supportable statement would be that if, by the evidence of your eyes, you can see a fat baby, then perhaps you're feeding it too much. There is no point in constantly telling people to be perfect; if that worked, the other 80% of adults wouldn't be obese either.

Last, there is always a fashion – or an agenda – at play in discussions about how to feed babies. A study such as this will arrive as if from a standpoint of neutrality, but the standpoint among medics is militantly pro-breastfeeding, to the extent that research would never even be undertaken if it might show breastfeeding in a bad light.(Take this as an example: Freud said that breastfeeding for too long left some people with an insatiable oral fixation, which is why people smoke, chew their nails or are alcoholics or both. Who would ever, in the spirit of enquiry, suggest that study, on the proportion of smokers that were breastfed? Only a mad person.) It would be good to see these findings presented with more restraint.